Binh Tran

I am pleased to once again recognized a few Temple students for their great achievements. At the 2012 AIS Leadership and Student Competition, many Temple students participated as finalist in various events. This competition was for all students in the AIS chapters around the United States. The competition was divided into four tracks: IT Risk Management, Mobile Application Development, Social Media Optimization, and Video Competition.

There would be two phases from each track, the first one would be an online virtual component that any student could participate in. Then the finalist would meet onsite in the second phase to compete face-to-face with the other finalists. Out of the four tracks, the students from the Temple AIS chapter was selected as finalist for three of the tracks and they came out with two 1st place awards and one with 2nd place. The Mobile Development and IT Video teams both came in 1st place and the IT Risk Management team came in 2nd place. This again proved that our MIS program has one of  the best talents there is in the nation. Those three teams received their plaques at the inaugural student completion winners.

I had a great opportunity to have a small interview with a member of the IT Risk Management team. Her name is Haoren Yu and she is also currently a the VP of Professional Development at AIS. She shared with me about the project/case and at the end she also encouraged why students should participate in this event in the future.

The project is a business consulting case. We, as a consulting team, acted as a consulting team that hired by the CIO of a company to persuade the CFO of Atlantic Paper Co. to implement an Identity Access Management System. We did a completed analysis for this case, including a project scope document, stakeholder analysis, a four-step business evaluation analysis, solution implementation plan, SMART analysis for that, etc.

I would encourage students to participate into this event more and more. It certainly helps students to put what they learn from class into practice. More important, it is about teamwork, and putting yourself in front of the real jury which are consisted by real business people with couple years of experiences. Furthermore, it is also important to fit our expectations into the real world scenarios.